Burning brush is an epiphany

Tuesday is unofficially Massachusetts Brush Burning Day, a time of tribal celebration, sacrificial hot dogs and a chance to legally spread fear through your neighborhood.

I have written way too much about the joys of brush burning. I know I am a bad influence on people with matches and too much time on their hands, and I am sorry for that.

Brush burning is something of an obsession, and sadly my promoting it as a redneck leisure activity may have contributed to husbands leaving their wives and neat-as-a-pin yards to move in with women who have acres of overgrown fields that need tending.

I am fortunate. My yard has many dying trees that have dropped, by my expert mathematical and statistical calculation, a boatload of branches and twigs in the 28 years I have lived here.

Fallen tree matter is my joy and entertainment. I occasionally solicit material from neighbors and friends, but always have plenty of my own to burn. There always seems to be just as much from one year to the next.

But like I said, I have written too much about brush burning season, which begins Jan. 15 and continues until sometime in the spring when the Fire Department determines that too many people have set the woods on fire.

I could go on and on about the healing effects of burning brush, how it is a natural cure for various strains of the flu and the equivalent of catnip for guys and a natural attractant for certain types of women. I have been burning brush in the winter since before the Internet was invented, and I hope to be remembered someday as “that crazy 100-year-old guy who fills the neighborhood with smoke each January.”

But like I said, I have written way too much about brush burning, and I never want to bore the reading public. They have enough to bore them in life, like listening to Congress or watching golf on television. They really don’t need to be put to sleep by some annual brush-burning column.

So this year I decided I needed a topic that people would talk about and put on their refrigerators.

As my weekly deadline approached, I found the perfect topic — rubber duckies.

Tomorrow, Sunday Jan. 13, which is 1-13-13 (queue up oohs and aahs on Facebook) is National Rubber Ducky Day (and more oohs and aahs).

That’s right, it is National Rubber Ducky Day. For those of you who don’t know what a rubber ducky is, you might want to take a course in popular culture. But to be kind, I will say that rubber duckies are duckies made of rubber.

Rubber Ducky Day celebrates the joys of the iconic bath toy made famous in 1970 by Ernie on “Sesame Street.” Those of you who don’t know who Ernie is should also read up on popular culture.

In studying the human condition hoping to find amusing anecdotes for my brush-burning columns, I have determined that most people, other than New York Yankees fans, like to take baths. I know I do, and nothing gives me more pleasure than playing with my rubber duckies while loudly singing Bob Seger songs.

Holding a special day for little rubber ducks may seem silly, but interesting ducky facts include that in 2009 a boatload of about 29,000 rubber duckies (and also red beavers, green frogs and blue turtles) fell off a ship in the Pacific Ocean, and some traveled around the world. Also, NASA uses rubber duckies to study glaciers in Greenland.

So if you are planning to celebrate, maybe with a little roast duck and a glass of wine, remember that rubber duckies are not just simple bath toys. Someday they could save us all from global destruction.